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Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk reacts next to Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump during a campaign rally, at the site of the July assassination attempt against Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2024.
Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has thrown his full weight behind former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Musk endorsed Trump in July after a gunman attempted to assassinate the former president at a Pennsylvania rally. In the time since, he’s spent millions to help Trump get elected, echoed conspiracy theories spread by the ex-president, and taken to the campaign trail to muster support for the GOP presidential nominee. But will it be enough to propel Trump to victory?
How influential is Musk? Through his various business holdings, Musk has the capacity to shape everything from public discourse and space travel to internet access in war zones.
For years, Musk — who has a net worth of $265 billion — was best known as the owner of Tesla and SpaceX. But in 2022, he acquired X (formerly Twitter). Musk has taken controversial steps since purchasing the social media platform, ranging from using his personal account with 201 million followers to spread outlandish, false claims to restoring accounts that had been banned for spreading misinformation, including Trump’s.
After Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last month, for example, Musk took to X and amplified baseless claims about the federal government seizing and blocking aid from being distributed, among other groundless assertions. Subsequently, there have been reports of FEMA aid workers being threatened, leading the agency to adjust operations — including stopping door-to-door visits.
This is just one example of the power Musk wields via his immense wealth and ownership of X, a major public forum. The erroneous information he’s helped spread has complicated hurricane relief efforts, making it harder to get aid to victims.
Can Musk sway the 2024 presidential election? Even before he publicly endorsed the former president,Musk launched a pro-Trump super PAC — America PAC — and pumped $75 million of his own money into it between July and September. America PAC has primarily focused on canvassing, digital operations, and direct mail.
Meanwhile, Musk has hit the campaign trail in swing states like Pennsylvania — even appearing onstage with the former president — as part of his efforts to boost Trump’s campaign. But Musk is a highly divisive figure, and polling suggests he could struggle to appeal to on-the-fence voters who could be crucial to winning in November.
A recent NBC News poll found that just 31% of independents view Musk positively. That said, the billionaire is fairly popular with Republican voters. The poll found 62% of GOP voters have positive feelings about Musk, though only 7% of Democrats said the same.
It remains to be seen whether Musk’s efforts to help Trump win will pay off. His super PAC has stumbled in its canvassing efforts in key battleground states due to problems linked to last-minute vendor switches and hiring struggles. Musk himself has acknowledged these setbacks. In response to a tweet about the super PAC’s woes earlier this month, he said, “Sorry, so many dumb things happening. Working on fixing.”
What does Musk get out of this? If the election goes the way the billionaire wants, Musk could be given a great deal of credit and gain even more influence over Trump as the former president once again assumes the most powerful office on the planet.
Trump has even suggested that he might offer Musk a spot in his Cabinet. He’s also discussed making Musk the head of a government efficiency commission, which could give the billionaire sway over rules that impact his companies. This could help explain why Musk has gone all-in on Trump’s campaign, despite once privately referring to the ex-president as a “stone-cold loser.”
Musk has openly admitted to supporting Democratic candidates in the past, but in 2022 he said he would start voting Republican because Democrats were now the party “of division & hate,” without elaborating. That same month, Musk also said he was switching to the GOP because of “unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX.”
Along these lines, it seems that Musk’s support for Trump is motivated by personal and transactional reasons as much as anything else. Musk’s companies have already received billions from the US government — SpaceX, for example, raked in $14.7 billion over the past decade in federal launch prime contracts. Trump could be a gateway to even more government money for Musk if he defeats Vice President Kamala Harris.
FILE PHOTO: Yahya Sinwar, Gaza Strip chief of the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement, waves to Palestinians during a rally to mark the annual al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day), in Gaza, April 14, 2023.
Ever since 1,200 Israelis were brutally murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, in southern Israel, the Jewish state has been on the hunt for the mastermind, the terrorist group’s leader, Yahya Sinwar.On Thursday,Israel confirmed that it had killed Sinwar in Gaza, reportedly with Israeli tank fire on a building where soldiers had picked up suspicious movement. His dental and fingerprint impressions match Israeli records.
Sinwar, one of Israel’s top targets, was previously believed to be deep underground surrounded by hostage human shields, so it came as a surprise that he had been killed practically in the open.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Sinwar’s death but stopped short of declaring total victory, saying, “Today, evil took a heavy blow — the mission ahead of us is still unfinished.”
He and US President Joe Biden spoke Thursday, and Biden urged Netanyahu to use the moment to bring hostages home and “bring the war to a close,” though Netanyahu made no such commitment. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both praised the successful killing of Sinwar, as did leaders from France, Germany, Italy, and the UK.
Will the war in Gaza wind down? Unlikely, though Netanyahu did offer to allow the terrorists holding the remaining Israeli hostages from Oct. 7 to leave if they laid down their arms and returned the prisoners. Israel’s operation in Lebanon against Hezbollah, which Netanyahu has promised to continue until Israeli civilians can safely return to areas near the northern border, remains ongoing.
Who will replace Sinwar? Hamas’ succession plans are opaque, but a few key figures stand out. Khaled Meshal was Hamas’ political leader between 1996 and 2017 and remains influential, but his opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has stressed his relationship with sponsors in Tehran. Probably the best option from Washington’s perspective is Khalil al-Hayya, who has led cease-fire negotiations for Hamas and is seen as more pliable than Sinwar. On the other hand, if Sinwar’s brother Mohammed Sinwar wins the power struggle, his hardline tendencies would likely undermine progress at the negotiating table.
FILE PHOTO: Afghan women walk after the recent earthquake in the district of Zinda Jan, in Herat, Afghanistan October 10, 2023.
2 million: The United Nations has called for an investigation into reports that Iran’s security forces opened fire last weekend on roughly 200 Afghan migrants who had entered the country illegally, killing an unknown number of them. Iran has threatened to deport as many as 2 million undocumented Afghan migrants who live in the country as refugees from decades of war and famine in their home country.
25: There’s no free lunch, they say – but if there were, you certainly shouldn’t use the money to buy acne treatment pads, wine glasses, or laundry detergent. Meta has fired around two dozen employees in its Los Angeles office after they were caught using the company’s $25 meal allowances to purchase household items.
5: Venezuela has arrested five foreigners, including three Americans, on charges of terrorism. Since winning a heavily disputed election this summer, President Nicolas Maduro has cracked down on the opposition, accusing it of collaborating with foreign intelligence operatives. The recent arrests bring to 12 the number of foreigners detained in Venezuela.
10: The US and NATO allies on Thursday marked 10 years since the start of their campaign to defeat Islamic State, often referred to as “ISIS.” On the plus side, the terror organization was rooted out of its modern “caliphate” strongholds in Syria and Iraq. On the minus side, it has shown a growing presence and capability in the Sahel, where some local governments are pushing out Western forces, and Central Asia, where Islamic State is at war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and has managed to carry out attacks in Russia.
Acting Director of the U.S. Secret Service Ronald Rowe Jr. speaks during a press conference as the FBI investigates what they said was an apparent assassination attempt in Florida on Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump, in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. September 16, 2024.
On Thursday, the independent, bipartisan panel created after the first assassination attempt released a 52-page report calling for new leadership because the protective agency had become “bureaucratic, complacent, and static.” While Secret Service personnel risk their lives to protect high-ranking government officials, the panel uncovered rampant cultural failures at the agency and concluded that without fundamental reform, “another Butler can and will happen again.” Among other comprehensive recommendations, they said the entire top leadership should be replaced with personnel from outside the agency “as soon as is practicable.”
The panel said that agents “deflected blame” for obvious security failures at the Pennsylvania rally and on the golf course. In Butler, they uncovered that “no fewer than nine” Secret Service agents were aware that the gunman, Thomas Mathew Crooks, was acting suspiciously before the shooting.
With the threat of increased political violence looming in the run-up to the US election, the service has boosted Trump’s security to the highest levels – equal to those of Kamala Harris — adding agents and equipment such as protective glass at his campaign events. Nevertheless, this report will likely lead to a historic overhaul of the agency over the next several months.
Doctors, paramedics, and medical students from various medical institutions are attending a protest against what they say is the rape and murder of a trainee doctor, inside the premises of R G Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata, India, on August 12, 2024.
In August, the brutal rape and murder of a female medical resident in a Kolkata hospital set off aseries of protests by doctors and others who demanded a full investigation of the crime and stepped-up police protection in government-run hospitals.
The protests haveexpanded to denounce corruption, poor working conditions, administrative mismanagement, and many other problems plaguing India’s hospitals. Morespecific demands include the implementation of a bed vacancy monitoring system to improve care, more security surveillance cameras inside hospitals, rooms on-site where doctors can rest between shifts, a better system for filling vacant doctor and nurse positions, more women in the workplace, and more hospital bathrooms, particularly for women.
With little progress in the investigation of the crime, more than two dozen doctors launched a hunger strike on Oct. 5. Six of them, who have had water but no food, have now been hospitalized, and at least two have been downgraded to critical condition.
The protests have grown larger in recent days as they coincide with the annual harvest festival of Durga Puja, which celebrates the Hindu goddess Durga as a symbol of women’s strength.
Pro-Palestinian protesters rally for a cease-fire in Gaza during the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in Dearborn, Michigan, on May 19, 2024.
In 2019, Mohamed S, an Egyptian-born investment consultant who had lived in New York for more than 20 years, finally decided to apply for US citizenship, for one reason:
“I wanted to vote against Donald Trump.”
But the pandemic delayed his naturalization until after the election. Next month will be the 47-year-old’s first chance to vote in a US presidential race. But this time, Mohamed says, he’s not going to cast a ballot at all.
Mohamed, who asked that we not use his last name over concerns his views might affect his business, said that while he still opposes Trump, the Biden administration’s Gaza policy has made it impossible for him to support a Democrat this fall.
“Why would I vote for a person who has provided weapons and funding that have been used to kill children who look exactly like my son, speak the same language as my son?” Mohamed asks. “That’s an outrageous thing to expect me to do.”
Mohamed’s views echo wider shifts in the Arab American community in the year since Hamas’ murderous rampage through southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, provoked an Israeli response that has killed at least 40,000 people in Gaza and displaced nearly 2 million, according to local authorities. Israel has faced charges of genocide in international courts.
A small community with big electoral power
About 4 million people in the United States identify as Arab Americans. They are a community of diverse faiths, national origins, and viewpoints. Roughly two-thirds are Christian, and one-third are Muslim. They have a large presence in key swing states like Michigan, comprising about 5% of the electorate there, and Pennsylvania, where they make up about 2%.
The war in Gaza looms large for them. More than 80% in a recent poll by the Arab American Institute, an advocacy group, said it’s their top election issue.
That marks the first time that any conflict in the Middle East has topped the list of concerns among Arab Americans, says AAI chairman James Zogby.
“It’s a genocide. And the administration’s response has been abysmal,” says Zogby, “not just in its full-throated support for Israel, but in its failure to put any restraint on Israel.”
Democrats are now paying the price
For decades, Arab Americans were a reliably blue voting bloc. Only about a third of the community ever voted Republican. In 2020, Biden got 59% of the Arab American vote against Trump’s 30%.
But the AAI poll, taken in early October, showed Trump edging out Harris 42% to 41% among Arab American voters — a 12-point swing in Trump’s favor. Expected turnout, meanwhile, has fallen from a historical average of 80% to around 60%.
Given that Biden won Michigan by less than three points in 2020, and Pennsylvania by just over one point, Arab American voters’ choices – not only about whom to vote for but whether to vote at all — could shape the outcome in November. At the moment, Harris leads Trump by roughly one point in both states.
Feeling ignored at a fraught moment
Zogby says weak outreach from the Democrat camp has hurt Harris. The Democrats’ rejection of calls for a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention stung, and the failure to hold high-level meetings with Arab American leaders — as opposed to lumping them in as part of a broader outreach to Muslim Americans — has made the community feel marginalized at a painful time.
“I’d love for her to call for a cease-fire, of course, but if she just got up and gave a speech in Michigan and said, ‘I want your support, I know we have differences, but I know we can talk them through, it would make a difference,” says Zogby.
Some Arab American voters are going further than simply staying home on Election Day.
“Six months ago, I was a Democrat,” says Bishara Bahbah, a Jerusalem-born, Harvard-trained academic and journalist. Now he is the founder of Arab Americans for Trump.
“I came to the conclusion that not only do I not want to vote for Biden or Harris, I want to actually punish them,” says Bahbah, a Palestinian Christian who grew up in East Jerusalem and now lives in Arizona.
Financed by Bahbah himself, Arab Americans for Trump has been coordinating events with Massad Boulos, the Lebanese-born businessman and father-in-law to Trump’s daughter Tiffany, as well as former Ambassador Richard Grenell, who was Trump’s acting director of national intelligence. Bahbah has met with Trump directly at least once, he says.
The Trump campaign has sought to expand its small base of Arab American support with pledges to cut taxes, crack down on undocumented immigration, and defend traditional views on gender, which plays well in many socially conservative Arab households.
A recent endorsement by Amer Ghalib, the Yemen-born mayor of Hamtramck, a Detroit suburb and the only US city with an all-Muslim local government, has helped the Trump effort.
Bahbah dismisses concerns about Trump’s history of strongly pro-Israel policies and his recent pledge to bring the US “closer [to Israel] than it’s ever been.”
“The difference is the Democratic camp has blood on their hands,” says Bahbah, who says he lost three relatives in an Israeli airstrike on an ancient church in Gaza last October. “President Trump does not.”
Bahbah is confident that Trump, without reelection to worry about, would make a push for a two-state solution after all.
“I think he is interested in leaving a legacy of a peacemaker.”
Not everyone who has soured on the Democrats shares that optimism about Trump.
“I’m not naive enough to believe that Trump would be better,” says Mohamed, the New York-based consultant. “I just don’t see a scenario in which Kamala Harris wins and things change in Gaza.”
But Zogby still sees more opportunity with a Democrat in the White House than not.
“There’s a coalition that exists in the Senate around Palestinian rights,” he says. “I would rather be fighting alongside them with a Democratic president than with a Republican president or a Republican Congress that wouldn’t give a shit at all.”
“People tell me it can’t be worse,” he says, “but it can always be worse.”
It is decision time for the politically homeless.
With 18 days left in the coin-toss US election campaign, both Republicans and Democrats are engaged in a form of political fracking, desperately trying to extract pockets of votes in hard-to-reach places. That’s why you saw Kamala Harris take on Bret Baier on Fox News on Wednesday night.
On the surface, it seemed like a waste of time. Most people who watch Fox News are not going to vote for Harris, but she’s betting that Donald Trump has alienated many long-standing Republicans, like Mitt Romney or Dick Cheney, and she wants to offer them a temporary political home. In an election where a few thousand voters in the key seven swing states may change everything, Harris believes polls telling her that disaffected Republicans are a growing, available group.
A recent New York Times/Siena College survey found that 9% of self-identified Republican voters nationally are voting for Harris, a number nearly twice what it was just five months ago. When Dick Cheney no longer feels at home in the big Republican tent, that’s not a Cheney problem, it’s a tent problem.
Democrats have their own tent problems. Some young people disaffected by the situation in Gaza are opting out of the Democratic Party, while some Jewish voters, traditionally Democrats, are backing Trump because of his overt support for Israel and his tough stance on Iran. And let’s not forget that about 20% of Black and Latino voters — especially men — see Trump as a better leader on the economy. As I have written about before, these men idolize the entrepreneurial genius and give-no-F’s aura of Trump hype man Elon Musk, who is consolidating that support. It is no surprise that former President Barack Obama is frantically out on the stumps chastising Black men for their lack of support for Harris.
This is the age of the politically homeless. Don’t like the MAGA Republicans because of their embrace of extreme voices like Marjorie Taylor Greene, or the rejection of free trade in favor of high tariffs and protectionism? Where do you go? The left has also embraced tariffs, and it too has an extreme side, with protest groups calling President Biden “genocide Joe” for supporting Israel’s fight against the terrorist group Hamas.
The right and left have drifted away from the political center in response to pressure from extreme positions on the fringes of their movements.
“There are a lot of politically homeless folks out there, which is a function of the political realignment we’re seeing to a large degree across the Western world,” my colleague Graeme Thompson, senior analyst at Eurasia Group, told me. “Some former Republicans can’t stand Trump, some former Democrats don’t like left-wing campus politics, but neither have a comfortable place to land.”
In Canada, a country that could face a federal election at any time given the precarious nature of Justin Trudeau’s minority government, it’s not so different.
“More than 4 in 10 people likely consider themselves homeless in Canada,” Nik Nanos, chief data scientist and founderof Nanos Research, told me. “Major swaths of voters are not voting FOR anything — they are voting against things — in many cases someone they dislike. The enthusiasm is directed against someone.”
What this means is that the center cannot hold. “The Liberals’ move to the economic and cultural left under Trudeau has forced out a lot of fiscally conservative, socially moderate ‘blue Liberals’ who might end up voting for the Tories but don’t feel it’s a natural fit. Similarly — although to a lesser degree — this is true for so-called ‘red Tories,’” says Thompson.
One consistent error the bleeding center makes is to blame the extremes for the polarization. There is a relentless focus on the “weird” or “crazy” things that happen on the edges. But all this misses the larger point. It’s not that the fringes are inherently attractive — most voters live in the center — but the center has failed to make its case for relevance. There is precious little self-reflection on why the center is suddenly so soft and why it has failed to deliver for so many voters.
“Small ‘l’ liberals seem to have forgotten that liberalism isn’t self-evident, revealed truth — its case has to be made in the political arena,” says Thompson. “Moderates are on the back foot, in part, because “the other guys are worse” isn’t compelling enough in difficult times when voters are demanding answers.”
In his book “Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy,” David Frum, maybe the most famous politically homeless Republican, does a superb job of outlining how the Burkean conservatives he championed squandered their arguments, especially on issues like the Middle East, the economy, and climate change. “In the twenty-first [century],” he writes, “that movement has delivered much more harm than good, from the Iraq War to the financial crisis to the Trump presidency.”
So while Republicans are trying to pick off small groups of politically homeless Democrats, like Black men and Jewish Americans, and Democrats are going after disaffected Republicans who believe Trump is bad for the country, the larger question remains: What can be done about it? Is the political center doomed, or can a new center emerge?
In the UK, Keir Starmer tacked to the political center to lead the once-more leftist Labour Party to a huge majority just a few months ago — a majority he now seems to be squandering.
But merely mouthing centrist words is just political lip-synching to cover up the fact that small “l” liberals no longer know how to play the instrument of government in a way that will solve the problems. Genuinely alienated voters have bolted to the fringes because they no longer believe government can actually solve the problems it promises it will solve. What to do about the cost of living, housing costs, and a feeling of powerlessness? These are deep problems that small “l” liberals have to solve to earn trust. That requires more than blame-game slogans.
“Being moderate isn’t a political program. You have to stand for something,” Thompson argues. “If there’s going to be a liberal, centrist, moderate political revival, it has to speak to the concerns of people.”
The paternalism of a government that spends money and gets involved in solving every problem for people not only fails to live up to its promises — it can’t solve everything — but it also creates a passive dependency, sending an implicit message that citizens can’t solve their own problems, only the government can. “When liberalism was successful in the past, it was about empowering people,” Thompson says. It doesn’t just rely on technocratic solutions from on high.
This doesn’t mean a new centrist party will emerge in the US or Canada. There is no real pattern for that, while the mainstream parties in both countries have a long history of changing and self-renovating, going from the extremes to the center and back again.
But for now, the fringes are ascendent, leaving behind wandering, zombie-like groups of politically homeless folks who can’t stand either side. These people are looking for reasons to vote Republican or Democrat without betraying their core principles, excusing crude mendacity, ignoring pressing problems, or ending up on the wrong side of history.
“With the advent of social media, voting against candidates or parties has been on the increase, which supercharges a negative political discourse,” says Nanos. “This has corresponded with increased anti-establishment sentiment. The impact is short-termism. Who can we punish today? Where can we vent our anger? The casualty is that discussions about long-term decisions are punted in favor of immediacy.”
That immediacy will likely mean most voters will ignore things they can’t stand and pick one salient issue — tax rates, climate, abortion, Israel, or Gaza — and cast a reluctant ballot.
“It’s hard to see the politically homeless being decisive this time around, either in the US or Canada,” says Thompson. “Except to the extent that they’ll hold their noses and pick a side.”